Bernie Sanders And All Those Damn Millennials

It’s only February and already I have an election year mind. What was once a well-sorted filing cabinet is now a desk piled high with newspaper clippings, half-remembered scandals, embarrassing photographs, and spurious rumors from a thousand different strangers. Every day I confront this desk in terror, looking for the magic key that makes the pile add up to something, but I never find it. The curse of the election year mind is searching for order in the scholarly equivalent of a hoarder’s storage unit auction.

There is no order, there’s no story that ties everything together in a ribbon, it’s just not there, so I’m clearing the desk off and shredding everything. Let’s start from scratch. How is Bernie Sanders getting so much traction when the Sure Thing, Hillary Clinton, is treading water in what remains of the old guard establishment?

I don’t know. The press has led me to believe this is a question best answered by spreadsheets. But permit me to take a crack at it. Now, where I come from, Bernie Sanders is a communist, and the kids who support him are entitled bums. They don’t know the value of a dollar. They don’t know about hard work. They don’t know how to get what they want, so they have to make somebody else get it for them. This is the participation trophy generation. They need a kick in the ass and they need to go and start their lives. Leisure made our children commies.

Those are red state America’s marching orders, albeit at varying levels of belligerence depending on the region. That’s the mentality I see everywhere. It’s the dominant line of thinking. And there are two problems here. First, there’s the eternal one. The older generation calling the younger generation weak. And that one’s universal. It’s probably happened to every generation in history. I’m sure there were people born in the 1860s who thought the kids dying of mustard gas in World War I were sissies.

Hell, my grandma grew up on a ranch, and she strangled chickens in the sink with her bare hands. There’s no way for me to compete with that. There’s no realistic way for me to replicate that. It’s just not how people get their chicken anymore.

But the other problem is things not said. Whenever the older folks talk about millennials being overgrown children too pampered and soft to leave mom’s basement, whenever the entitlement problem shows up again, it ignores what happened to our country. The middle died.

I am a broke millennial and I am surrounded by broke millennials. I’ll refrain from generalizations, but me, my family, the people I know, we work like hell when the work shows up. There is no absence of ability or desire to work hard, there just isn’t any work. What apathy there is, is apathy born of not having a reason for being. In a regular town, not a city but a town, where rent is not starkly and hideously impossible, there are no jobs that can steer us toward the middle class. We can kill ourselves working and it won’t get us out of paycheck-to-paycheck dread and exhaustion and nerves.

There is a ceiling on what hard work can do when you’re in the stock room of a big box store. And there is a ceiling on how much hard work you’re allowed to do in the first place. When I hear millennials talk about work, it’s “I didn’t get enough hours” and “they won’t make me full time” and “I wonder why my back is so fucked up.” It is never the soulless, bloodless marketing vision statement platitudes about “authentic workplaces” and “fulfillment.” It’s not enough hours and not enough money and too much pain.

What people don’t notice, when they say millennials are entitled, the thing they gloss over, is that it all went to shit. The Horatio Alger strategies of the ’50s and ’60s, they don’t work anymore. Have you seen the jobs available to an average person at an average place in this country? There are no ladders to climb. Everything is service jobs hovering at minimum wage. Salaries that allow you to survive but totally shut out the possibility of starting a life, which requires an escape fund and a plan.

And here’s something that happens when you’re trapped in that survival income: none of your money will ever add up to anything. If you make $12,000 a year, saving it feels futile. You’re just putting up levees against dental work and blown head gaskets. You’re not saving for a nice and shining future, you’re steeling yourself against doom. So whatever money you can blow on frivolous escapism and vice, well, go ahead and blow it, because it will never meaningfully contribute toward a way out of your life. A hundred bucks can buy plenty of distractions but it’s barely a drop in the ocean you need to cross if you ever want to get the hell out.

There’s just not much to do that feels tangible and real. Jobs that make human being money, aside from the army, are illusory and largely seen on television. If you work at a Shell station in Prineville or a Kmart in Shawnee, you’ll really only know people in the service industry. There are no magic phone calls to make to get the ball rolling on changing that. You’ll have just about enough energy to hold down that job and be on the lookout for addicts who might steal from you. And college is a shot in the dark, too expensive and not enough of a sure thing to provide an exit strategy like it once did.

America wasn’t like that fifty years ago. There were tangible dreams and your friends gave you a blueprint for following yours. That’s all gone now.

Here’s the thing about Bernie Sanders. If you’re a working class millennial in 2016 and you’re not plugged into the pulse of some big city, if you didn’t get four years in the womb of a well-manicured college, politicians don’t give a shit about you. You are invisible. You are worse than invisible. You are irrelevant. Bernie Sanders isn’t campaigning on free marijuana and Xboxes. He’s not pandering to the entitlement of a bunch of kids drooling at screens. He’s just admitting that Jenny at the Modesto Dressbarn actually exists, and he’s admitting that a lot of things are ruined, and he’s saying it like he means it, and he’s providing a way out of the wreckage. Nobody else is doing that.

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Your story is why this grandmother of three millenial grandsons is supporting Bernie Sanders. The future belongs to the millenials. I want all of you to stand up, show up, and claim it.

joeyoungblood

Except none of this will work. Teach your grandkids work ethic and the value of a hard days work. Teach them to find something they are good at, and to never stop learning. They are experiencing something incredibly different than you ever did and doubling the size of government will only lead to more complications.

Htowndude

Will work ethic keep them from working 4-5 jobs to make the rent?
Will hard work keep Wall Street from gaming the system, and buying politicians?
Will being good at something help them pay off their college loans?
The game is rigged, and people like you, are part of the problem, by enabling our ‘leaders’ to continue to be bought and sold.

OaklandBikeMedic

Somebody didn’t read the article.

darib88

you comments show a lack of reading comprehension or will to learn, both of which are destroying America…

Tracy Bowersox

People like you… you JUST don’t know. You have no idea what the reality is for people like me. The work is being done, the skills are there, the money is NOT. Hard work and skill get you NOTHING in the real world. What gets people out of the paycheck to paycheck tarpit is pure luck.

mayalibre

LOVE your piece! In many ways it’s too bad Bernie casts himself as a socialist because he’s not really that. He’s not advocating for the State to own and control all the means of production for example. What Bernie really is is a New Dealer. And the older folks — at least those who lived through the Depression, or who had parents who did, and who haven’t been brainwashed by the neocons — would understand this much better. In the spirit of your piece, I’d like to recommend this one from Counterpunch discussing financial feudalism. This is HOW the moat between the rich and the poor is continuously being made wider and impossible to cross. It also discusses how the fixes proposed by the mainstream don’t really fix it. http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/12/financial-oligarchy-vs-feudal-aristocracy/ Keep writing! You’re doing great.

zenlyarrogant

Upton Sinclair (Guy who wrote ‘The Jungle’) cast himself as a socialist. In all of his writings and his political agenda, you know who he campaigned for the fair rights of? It has a lot of similarities with Bernie.

Ed Falis

I’m 64, and I relate to what you’re saying completely. Even if I have been lucky. Thanks for sharing it around.

Deva Temple

Thank you for your honesty and vulnerability. It is important to share our stories because there are a lot of people out there who don’t know the realities we are up against. I did go to school, good schools, but my family wasn’t rich so I went on financial aid. When I first graduated with my BA, the interest rates were under 4%. Bush raised them to above 8%. At that point I was in graduate school where I took on extra loans because I had to work full time and combine that income with my student loans to get by. It took me three years to get my MA and that cost upwards of $60,000. Combine that with my undergrad loan, which was the average of around $23,000 and you have over $80,000. Compound interest at over $500 a month and I graduated with almost $100, 000 in debt. My first job out of grad school collapsed. It was a financial services startup that was laundering money for an investor who had just gotten out of federal prison for securities fraud. He stole over 500 million while we were working for him – mostly from retirees and soon-to-be retirees who were looking for a way to get their retirements to last longer. He cleaned out most of them. When I found out I turned myself and my company in to the FBI and walked away from six figures and multi-million dollar bonuses. Needless to say, finding work after that was difficult. How do you explain what you’ve been doing for the last year?

I moved from LA to Portland, Oregon where I looked for work for two years. I worked part time for a quadriplegic. I made $8.00 an hour. I never got an interview in those two years. I only once received more than an automated “we received your resume” response. Eventually I just gave up, cut up my credit cards, stopped paying on everything. My student loans went into default. My credit went through the floor. I no longer cared. They would call and threaten to take my social security. I would just laugh and laugh. “You can have it,” I would say. “There won’t be anything to take.”

My dad recently asked me why I don’t just declare bankruptcy and get rid of my student loans. I told him that it was not legal to do so, that student loans are the ONLY kind of debt you can never discharge in bankruptcy. He didn’t believe me. I googled it for him and showed him. He decided to vote for Bernie after that. He didn’t know what kind of position I am in. He never went to college so he doesn’t know.

Most of my friends struggle to make ends meet. If they do it is because they have some sort of money coming from their families. One friend is doing ok after working her way up at a gas station. She’s in middle management now and makes close to six figures but she is miserable and drinking herself to death because she sees no other possibility for her life. Other friends are not even that lucky. Some have health problems that have placed them into deep debt and limited their ability to work. Others got saddled with debt trying to start businesses that failed and have worked menial jobs for almost twenty years trying to pay it off. The only friends I have who are doing well financially either inherited money or sell marijuana. Those are the options for this generation. That’s the reality. If you go to college you just have more debt and not a whole lot more options.

I tried to “do the right thing” and make my family proud. I wanted to better myself and make a difference in the world. I no longer believe in the American Dream. We have all been robbed of our future. The only way this is going to change is if we educate ourselves and each other about how the economic system actually works (and does not work) and if we talk to others about it and if we fight for our lives. Those are the only things we can do to recover some semblance of possibility for ourselves and for future generations.

joeyoungblood

Bush didn’t raise rates. The consolidated student loan rates are set by the banks before they are ever consolidated. The democrat controlled congress voted to expand educational opportunities and the only way to do that was to incentivize the banks. That being said it should be federal policy to drop these to the default rate. Let me be very clear, Bernie Sanders doesn’t want to do that at all. He won’t help you in this regard.

joeyoungblood

He has nice sentiments but his plans won’t spur job creation. The 6.2% employer side tax will get passed on as a lower wage, reduced hours, or lost jobs to automation technology. The end net result might be that the tax isn’t even enough to cover universal health care.

He also wants to offer amnesty to the 8.1 million illegal laborers in this country that take “Jobs Americans won’t do” a moniker coined by Democrats over the last decade that means jobs the youth USED to do but feel they are better than. This is part of that 52% unemployment rate.

He hasn’t offered to drop the Federal Consolidated Student Loan rate from whatever it’s at down to the Feds Default Rate which would open up millions in spending capital and allow some millennials to focus on career growth and not working 2 jobs.

His idea for free college won’t help either. Job placement rates for college grads are dismal and building up more competition in the labor supply will only hurt those already in the job market further depressing wages.

Ways to positively impact the millennial work force, of which I’m a part:
1. remove medical and education expenses from FICO
2. improve ways for millennials to buy property, but without allowing banks to take higher risks
3. crack down on overseas tax havens (one thing he’s said he would do)
4. provide more grant money for small business startups
5. force copyright law back to 56 year limits
6. provide incentives to employers to offer raises, pensions, higher wages, etc..

John Michael Crofford

Better than removing medical and education expenses from FICO (which will just prompt substitution with proxy variables) is to remove medical and education expenses entirely with singlepayer and taxpayer-funded university education.

The best way to improve the buying power of young people is to make sure that they don’t need to start their adult lives in serious debt to be competitive for good jobs. What crippling debt would we have to eliminate? College debt. What is the easiest way to do that? “Free” university, probably 2-4 years unconditional and some performance (major GPA?) and/or timeliness (can’t take more than x amount of time per degree) condition for the rest.

Grant money for startups would be great, but that role is traditionally filled by friends and family members. If young people are starting with less debt, then they will likely have more money to essentially Kickstart their friends and relatives.

Anything that unconditionally raises the standard of living, such as universal healthcare, is an incentive to employers to improve offers to employees and potential employees. Why? Because employees that can afford to turn an offer down are employees that have real bargaining power.

Eric Fager

On the 6.2 employer side tax, doesn’t that replace existing healthcare premiums?

Dolph

Good grief. Bernie reminds me of that aardvark from the cartoon ant and the aardvark. The millineals are products of a faulted school system and parents from the same. Be true to yourself and work on yourself, because it’s entirely up to you. These political fools are about money, bought and paid for. They could care less about you or your woes. America isn’t easy. America is advanced capitalism, you want something bad enough, work for it…you just might make it. Be prepared cause someone will fight you all the way.

Commish of hangin’

America is advanced capitalism, you want something bad enough, work for it…you just might make it.

The problem with this statement is that many millenials (like me) have seen absolutely no benefit to this system. Let’s not forget that we did exactly what our parents and grandparents said- work hard, do well in school, go to college- and many of us have nothing to show for it. If you play by the rules and have nothing but debt and a crappy job to show for it, you’re going to be pissed off.

Dolph

Work harder. Expect nothing. Learn survival skills. Be self-reliant. Life’s a bitch, so is the system, treat it as such. I respect your point though.

Commish of hangin’

You’re assuming I don’t already know all the pointers you told me, but that’s a big problem when talking to most people of older generations because of the huge disconnect in lifestyles. People my age already work plenty hard- usually at jobs that aren’t the usual fulltime 9-to-5- and get far less benefit (in pay and otherwise) out of it than their parents and grandparents. Many of us already have bills to pay in the form of student loans, so these crappy low-paying jobs don’t cut the mustard, and more often than not, they’re the only jobs available to us.

The system was nowhere near as much of “a bitch” 40, 50, 60 years ago, because you could reasonably expect to get a stable career out of a college education, which didn’t cost nearly as much money as it does now. And as I said in my original comment, this is what our parents said we would get if we followed the rules. We were scammed, plain and simple. It used to be that we valued the prospect of having future generations live better than the ones before them, but now it feels like the overriding attitude is “lol tough shit kids, nut up or shut up.” If you think wanting things as easy as the two previous generations had it is “entitlement,” then you’re running counter to that attitude, and it has a poisonous effect on society.

So that’s why a lot of people my age are voting for Bernie Sanders- he represents the best possible chance of getting things back that way.

I feel like I could just say “read the article again” since it says the same things that I said, but that would be mean, and I wanted to talk about my way of seeing things.

Dolph

I get it and appreciate your sincerity. Maybe I was on a rant, but just came off a 48 hr shift.

Chad

wow sounds like the same problems everyone has had since the beginning of time…poor you

Commish of hangin’

Did you even read the article?

Chad

Yes but my comment was directed at your whining not the article.

Commish of hangin’

That $12,000 a year number hit close to home for me. Last year was my first time after leaving graduate school that I had consistent work. It was mostly part-time, with a brief promotion to full-time during the end of the fiscal year for the organization that I worked for- a large and well-established nonprofit that takes in a lot of state funding. I worked in the finance department, but mostly doing drudge work- filing away completed forms, setting up forms to start the payment process, and minimal use of the programs they use to pay vendors. Some of my coworkers said to me that they think I’m too smart for that kind of work, and I completely agree with them. I made $10 an hour, and when I looked at my tax return that my parents were sending off to their accountant (yes, it can even suck for the children of people who are successful), I made a couple hundred dollars over that number. Did I mention that this May will be five years since I dropped out?

I don’t work for that organization anymore, as I was let go at the beginning of January, but the good news is that they are helping me find a different job, as that’s one of several things it does for its clientele. The bad news is that I highly doubt that this new job, whatever it might be, will provide me with any opportunity for mobility and higher pay. I’m taking classes, applying to jobs, and speaking with recruiters, but I have no optimism that this snag will be resolved any time soon.

So Bernie wants everyone who wants to to go to college and get a degree, fine. So now you have , say twice as many people with degrees looking for the same amount of jobs that the people with degrees now can’t find. How did that help? Please be nice i am seriously trying to understand. I am older and believe in hard work to get what you want. I also have been trying to hire teenagers to work at $10 for years with 0 applications. I had to hire foreign temp agency to fill positions. I have 2 sons that seen a great work ethic in their parents, both of us worked our way up to exec. positions, and yet they work but can’t seem to pay bills or save. Instead they enjoy themselves very much. We could have also enjoyed ourselves more, but we chose to work and save and take a little pride in what we worked for since we were both 14. This is what i feel has died. And yes i do think the rich ger richer and the poor get poor but my dad said those same words to me in 1968